Cybercriminals will manipulate your domain name to trick people

Yes, these domains serve fake websites and malicious emails. Cybercriminals create them to fool people into sharing their personal information, like login credentials and bank account details.

If you have an ecommerce website, this particularly applies to you.

People with bad intentions may take advantage of your domain name, register a variation, and use it to steal your customers’ personal information. If this happens, you’ll lose brand reputation and customer trust.

Real-Life Example: Google

As the king of the internet, Google has sixty other domains. Aside from its main domain google.com, it also owns other variations like gogle.com, googel.com, and goggle.com.

Try it yourself! Keying in Googel.com on your browser redirects you to Google’s main website.

This strategy protects Google from imitators trying to profit from their brand.

Another Real-Life Example: Apple

When developers launched internationalised domain names (IDNs), it provided a platform for non-English speakers to register domains using the character sets in their language.

Unfortunately, this also paved the way for cybercriminals to create domain names that look exactly like the known ones.

Apple is one such case.

A similar domain name, аррӏе.com, used the Cyrillic alphabet to extract Latin look-alike characters to spell out the original domain name. When users visit the domain, they get redirected to another — not to mention suspicious — website.

Your target customers may misspell your domain name

Let’s say you have a potential customer that heard about your business from someone else.

But they assumed the wrong spelling of your business name. So, when keying it on their browsers, they don’t get your business as a result.

That’s website traffic you could’ve earned — but didn’t.

Real-Life Example: Fatbrain.com

To prevent cases like that from happening, Fatbrain.com — now owned by Barnes & Noble — purchased fatbrian.com, a pretty common misspelling of their domain name.

So when their customers accidentally key this in their browsers, they instead get redirected to the original fatbrain.com site.

Smart, empathetic, and forward-thinking, if you ask us.

Cybersquatting exists

While there are people who buy domain name variations to trick consumers, there are those who choose to extort from business owners.

They come up with variations of a popular domain name — a change in TLD, a misspelling, etc. — then buy it for themselves. When the owner of that domain name contacts them for it, they offer to sell the domain name (or names, if they’re that sneaky) for a sky-high price.

This is cybersquatting. And this is a huge (and expensive) problem for businesses.

Real-Life Example: Pinterest

In 2012, photo-sharing website Pinterest filed a cybersquatting lawsuit against Qian Jin, who got the domain name variations pinterests.com and pinterest.de.

The court, in the end, ruled in favour of Pinterest.

However, having to resort to lawsuits just to acquire variations of their domain name was costly — and could have been easily prevented.

Get multiple domain names now

Failing to register more than one domain name for your business will cost you more money in the long run.

Be one step ahead of competitors, cybercriminals, and honest mistakes. Reserve all possible variations of your domain name your resources can allow, including:

Variations involving other character sets (like the Cyrillic alphabet)

After getting these variations, use them to redirect people to your actual site.

Your domain name represents your brand online. When it’s used in bad faith, it can hurt your business in more ways than one. Investing in multiple domain names will protect you from these consequences.